Enhancing, Provocative and Future Tense

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Monthly Archives: June 2014

The gradual political shift to the left by women voters in Europe and the Americas is a remarkable and significant indicator of the push for greater gender equality. Sociologists point out that the shift of women to the left is striking because only a few decades ago they had voted to the right of men.1 After they had become eligible to vote in 1928 (ending the prolonged struggle of the UK’s suffragettes) women were crucial in helping to keep the Conservatives in power. In the 1950s Winston Churchill won because more women voted Tory than men [by more than 14%]. Ironically, their loyalties began to shift with the fall of the Tory government under Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister. With the greater feminine concern for health care, education and benefits in the election of Blair in 1997, the shift in the UK was complete.

A similar scenario was experienced in the US over the past three decades, where more women have voted for Democrats. Some sociologists have traced this development to the decline in marriages and the rise in divorce which has made women poorer and men comparatively richer.2 Others contend that the rise of female employment in the labor market has made women more likely to favor the left by increasing their awareness of labor market discrimination as well as the demand for state subsidized child care. Whatever the reasons, Romney received less than 45% of the overall women’s vote in his race against Obama in 2012.

In an editorial page article in the Guardian, Seumas Milne wrote that women are significantly more hostile to cuts in benefits, pensions, health and education than men.3 It is important to note here that women make up two-thirds of the public sector work force in the UK and three-quarters of the National Health Service and local government. This has also increased the power of women in the trade unions. The consequence has been an historic shift in the political scene over the past three decades. Women of today are far more vocal in their opposition to the use of force, are more supportive of environmental reforms, are on average in favor of progressive taxation and generally endorse the benefits of the welfare state.

Politics often seem contradictory to common sense. I remain puzzled as to how Republicans in the US and Conservatives in the UK, fully aware of the continuing shift to the left in the voting pattern of women, are doing so little to make their expressed desire to reduce the size of government more electorally acceptable. Prime Minister David Cameron is painfully aware of his unpopularity among his country’s women with an election coming up in the UK next May. What has he promised them? To cut one million public servants by 2017! Now there are more females today working for the government than men and new jobs will be difficult for the women dismissed by the Tories to find. How can reasonably intelligent politicians move so blatantly against their own and the electorate’s best interests? Or are they in some kind of irrational state of denial about the political shift in the allegiance of women?

In the United States it seems most likely that Hillary Clinton will run for the presidency on the Democratic ticket, but the Republicans have done absolutely nothing over the past six years to make their platforms more popular to women. Obama won his second term because of the votes of women who felt more secure with a President who was committed to public services. Today the right wing of the Republican Party wants to cut benefits to a bare minimum. It does not take a brilliant mathematician to recognize that this will almost guarantee electoral defeat. However, the Tea Party, endorsed by sectors of the corporate world, has maintained its gender hostile agenda.

Despite these political shifts by women, their systematic under-representation in the legislatures of democracies continues. They are not helped in either England or the US because female politicians seem to self-select into offices with a high turnover. On the way up the political ladder, the attrition rate is dramatic. Although about a quarter of women hold jobs in state legislatures in the US and in local councils in the UK, when it comes to the House of Representatives and the House of Commons this figure falls to under 20 percent. “As long as females are the default care-givers, they face an uneven playing field,” conclude sociologists Iversen and Rosenbluth, because markets will discriminate against them.4 There are exceptions, however. The deliberate and rational approach of Angela Merkel in Germany, who has become the most powerful leader in the European Union, has gained the reluctant acceptance of both genders irrespective of her political position on the right.

The notion that women in politics function with greater collaboration and effectiveness than men, has long been an appealing but empirically unproven proposition. This past year, however, the 20 women in the US Senate (16 of whom are Democrats and only four Republicans) have been running something of a lab test: These female Senators now chair or sit as ranking members in ten of the Senate’s twenty committees and have been responsible for passing a majority of the bills despite the intense rancor of right-wing Republicans. There is a deep sense that more unites these women personally than pushes them. “One of the things we do a bit better is listen,” said North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp.

In the midst of the political deadlock in the Senate last autumn, Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins took to the Senate floor and, refraining from partisan blame, proposed a plan to end the political gridlock. “I ask my Democratic and Republican colleagues to come together. We can legislate responsibly and in good faith.” Senate Appropriations Committee chair, Barbara Mikulski (a Maryland Democrat) agreed saying, “I am willing to negotiate. I am willing to compromise,” and a few minutes later a democratic Senator said, “I am pleased to stand with my friend from Maine, Senator Collins.” Looking for common ground and ways to work together resulted in a plan that led to genuine talks between Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell to end the government shutdown.5 In recognition of their contribution to politics, the women Senators were invited to dine with President Obama in the White House. Going around the table, Barbara Boxer (Democrat, California) remarked that 100 years earlier they would have been meeting outside the White House gates to demand the right to vote. President Obama retorted: “A hundred years ago I’d have been serving you.”

Women are more likely to support activist government spending across a range of welfare programs than men. In the UK, women have disproportionately felt the consequences of Cameron’s austerity program which seriously cut back on services and jobs in the public sector.6 In addition, cuts in maternity pay, legal aid, and child benefits as well as wage freezes and pay caps have resulted in increasing numbers of women, half of whom are now members of the trade unions, protesting against gender discrimination. Single women, in particular, are at the forefront because they have to rely on outside options in case they need economic support.

Women are thus rapidly changing the political landscape around the world. With 50% of the adult population and even a greater percentage of the over 60s eligible to cast their ballots, their impact in the coming decades will steadily increase. How men will react is unclear but it is likely that they will try to cover their insecurity. Beyond that, the possible election of a woman as President of the most powerful nation in the world would alter voter engagement and perspective. It would certainly lead to greater representation of women in legislatures around the world. Such a universal shift towards greater gender equality could well result in the much-needed improvement in global relations which until now have been dictated by men.

Hope, that invisible, intangible, and optimistic word, almost seems wired into our psyche. No one knows when the idea of hope first surfaced in human consciousness. It appeared in ancient Greek mythology with Hesiod’s story of Prometheus, mankind’s great benefactor, who stole the secret of fire from Zeus. This so infuriated the supreme god that in revenge he created a great vase (now incorrectly called “Pandora’s Box” ) which he filled with misery and every manner of affliction which would fly out if opened. The beautiful but untrustworthy Pandora, (the first woman, created at Zeus’s command by Hephaestus) was unaware of the contents, but had been warned never to take off its cover. When curiosity eventually got the better of her, all kinds of troubles flew out into the world, except for hope, which remained at the very bottom of the vase. Thus the first woman unwittingly introduced disease, despair, pain and other miseries into the world. So much for hope’s introduction to the ancient Greeks.

Two centuries after Hesiod and Homer had spread this complex and wonderful myth, Thales of Miletus, often credited with being the first of Greek philosophers, wrote that “Hope is the only good that is common to all men; those who have nothing else possess hope still.” Those Greeks who followed him, like Plato and Aristotle, considered hope to be connected to the gods and something akin to a waking dream.

The Old Testament recognized, we are all “prisoners of hope.”1 As one of our most frequently used expressions, hope is what keeps much of humanity going. Hope refuses to accept despair, so it is actively embraced by all religions. Hope is one of the three theological virtues of Christianity. In the Bible hope has entailed a strong and confident expectation of an afterlife. It is thus a source of ultimate salvation. The founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, wrote that “faith without hope is nothing worth, for hope endures and overcomes misfortune and evil.”2 Like so many Church fathers, Luther believed transcendental hope was at the basis of everything, including religion, because it kept the future open. Thus Thomas Aquinas regarded hope as that which is “possible of attainment.”3 Modern philosophers like Jacques Ellul have come to regard hope as man’s response to the silence of God.4

Hope looks forward with desire, reasonable confidence and expectation. The philosopher Ernst Bloch attempted to articulate a philosophical approach to hope and also treated hope as a cosmological principle. “The striving, yearning, and anticipation of something ‘not yet’ that characterizes human hope is also a fundamental feature not just of non-human life, but of the universe itself. This yearning and striving is the key to understanding not just human nature but nature as such. The hope principle is thus not a confined but an open process.”5

Today we recognize that hope can take us beyond ourselves, our limitations and our predicaments. Humanity appreciates that hope expands our horizons and our potentialities. The “advance” or progress of mankind requires hope, realistic hope in the possibility of improvement. Such hope ultimately has to be based on planning, scientific research, and social endorsement if it is to be effective. Hope encompasses both utopian and communitarian dreams as well as our spiritual needs. Jean-Paul Sartre said: “I think that hope is built into man. Human action is transcendent. It places its goal, its realization in the future. There is hope in the very manner of action — in the fixing of a goal to be reached.”6 Although sometimes on the edge of despair, as a philosopher Sartre came to respect hope as ‘the nerve of moral action.’ I profoundly believe that although we can harbor deep unease about the way things are, we must have hope about how things could be. From the very first this has been at the basis of my blog.

President Obama gave us great hopes for change when he was elected and now that such changes have not come about we feel disappointed and somehow cheated. Obama himself hoped that with bi-partisan support in Congress he could bring about substantive changes. His profound hopes, based on a long history of political party cooperation in American history, were not realistic. Racism and political radicalization turned compromise into a dirty word. No matter what the President proposed, the Republicans denounced it. In such a narrow-minded atmosphere, hope for change began to evaporate.

Some political figures have given people hope in important ways: Churchill, Roosevelt, Atlee, Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton all filled us with hope at different moments in their careers. Others, like Baldwin and Nixon, never were convincing. It is difficult for us to accept that hope also can be an escape from the harshness of the present, that it can be a denial of reality. This may lead some to disparage hope as an extension of the predominantly wishful thinking of childhood. The rejection of hope is recognized by psychologists as a child’s method of avoiding disappointment.

While recognizing that we cannot live without hope, most people today live without optimism because of the vast scale of the problems facing us at every level. Our destiny is no longer manifest as was believed before WWI. The desirability of advancing from hope to optimism is not even a notion subscribed to by all. A dystopian and fatalistic outlook has spread around the world. Such fatalism purports that as it is impossible to know what is going to happen, we should pray that the worst is not going to consume us. Spiritually this debilitating outlook tends to rob life of its potential for meaning. What progress we can make depends in large measure on our willingness to risk possible improvements.

It should give us hope that we can creatively adapt ourselves and change just as all other existing life-forms have done through evolution. Positive feed-back has been one of the basic mechanisms of life. It should fill us with hope that bit-by-bit we are unraveling the secrets of the universe and that this will make our own existence more comprehensible. Hope cannot be excluded from scientific empiricism because science itself is based on the continuing hope that the experiment will succeed and the hypothesis will be proven.

Optimism is frequently criticized because it exceeds strictly reasonable, ‘realistic’ boundaries. I am all too aware of Machiavelli’s warning that “Men commit the error of not knowing when to limit their hopes.” However, I believe that hope should have no limit. We must let our imagination soar with our hearts and let the best in our minds prevail. A vision of what could be is of the essence, for we cannot move from hope to optimism without it. As the Bible says: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”7

I fervently believe that our hopes, ideas and ideals can ultimately be translated into actions to bring about a far greater degree of social harmony. I do not believe that capitalism is guiding us towards that goal. The fabled ‘market’ does not provide us with a sense of social direction. We must meet our enduring human needs in new ways. Envisioning a different economic structure constitutes one of our greatest challenges, but one which we must embark upon with hopes for a more sustainable and viable future. The wholeness and unity of humanity is of the essence as well. Each one of us must do what we can to further an environment in which our collective hopes could develop into optimism. For optimism itself can turn life into a more brightly lit vision. As the metaphysical poet George Herbert wrote some four hundred years ago: “He that lives in hope dances without music.”

Outsourcing domestic security is a costly and risky way to “reduce” governmental expenditures on the military, the police, the penal system and even health care. The truth is, as I have analyzed in the first two blogs on national security, that outsourcing is driven in part by the profit motive but also by politicians driven by ideological positions. The outsourcing of prisons, air traffic controls, or even policing military facilities by such giant companies as G4S and Serco ultimately tends to undermine our security rather than consolidate it.

These companies, whose executives are far more skilled at winning highly profitable government contracts than in providing acceptable levels of service, appear ready to take on any activity, irrespective of their qualifications. For example, in the UK an outsourcing group has been offering investors an 18% return on their money on the care of disabled, disturbed, or needy children in residential homes. As the writer Polly Toynbee observed: “Now troubled children are an investment opportunity.”1

The increasingly contentious relationship between the Police Federation and Prime Minister David Cameron’s party has been driven in part by the ever greater desire to reduce the power and the costs of those doing the policing. London’s police force is paying £500 million ($800 million) a year for back office functions which have been transferred to private sector groups. The police contend that their federation has been subjected to a Tory-led campaign of denigration. Cameron insists he wants to “release the grip of state control,” but he is in danger of giving up his nation’s security to a few firms that may become “too big to fail” and will run out of anyone’s ability to control them.

The speed of the outsourcing revolution in both the UK and the US has been phenomenal: Outsourcing deals in the public sector in the UK went up by 168% in the first quarter of this year.2 The companies involved focus more on the contract they want to win than on implementing its fulfillment. Those hired at the lowest fees available often lack training, skills or the understanding essential for security. Let us look at the growing trend to outsource the penal system in both countries:

The very idea that privatizing prisons, so that corporations can make money from those being incarcerated, seems patently immoral. I am not alone in this: The U.S. Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church and the Catholic Bishops of the South have all called for a moratorium on the construction of private prisons or for their outright abolition. (Admittedly, a few people exploiting society’s larger social problems for their own gain is also part of the deeper problem underlying the entire capitalist steam-roller.) The influence of this for-profit prison industry in the US has now come to be described as the “prison industrial complex.” Its power has been attacked by criminologists, economists, religious and community leaders, human rights activists, and even correctional officer unions. The privatizing of prisons has led to a revolving door between public and private correctional institutions which minimizes the usually required disclosure of public-private ties.

Critics claim that private prisons don’t save the state money because, like any other business, they try to maximize their profits. This leads to a reduction of essential services within the privatized institution. Staff costs, medical care, clothing and food are all kept to a minimum — affecting the inmates, the staff, and the correctional aspects of the institution itself. Studies suggest that the smaller staff levels and inadequate training at these prisons has led to increases in violence, riots, and escapes. Assaults on guards by inmates were almost 50 per cent more frequent in private prisons than in government-run ones, according to a nationwide US study which claimed that assaults on fellow inmates were 65 per cent more frequent in these outsourced prisons. Apparently correction officers may also be in charge of smuggling drugs and even weapons into their prison in order to earn more money. This is hardly the way to improve national security!

A 2014 study3 revealed that minorities make up a greater percentage of inmates in private prisons than in public ones. Privatizing (outsourcing, in effect) of prisons threatens to re-institute the link between race and commerce of slave-trading days: 50% of prisoners today are African-American, 35% are Latino and only 15% are White. In part this may be because it is cheaper and more profitable to incarcerate blacks than whites! The for-profit prison operators, like the GO and CCA groups, are able to select these lower cost inmates “through explicit and implicit exemptions written into contracts between these private prison management companies and state departments of correction.”

Perhaps one of the most corrupting aspects of the private prisons in the southern states is the historically racist practice of “Convict Leasing.” The historian Alex Lichtenstein pointed out that “only in the South did the state entirely give up its control to the contractor; and only in the South did the physical “penitentiary” become virtually synonymous with the various private enterprises in which convicts labored.”4

Cindy Chang, a reporter for The Times–Picayune wrote in May 2012 that Louisiana now had the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world. The hidden engine behind the state’s growing private prison machine has been profit. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or the prison industry in Louisiana would go bankrupt. If inmate counts fall, profit is reduced and the state’s powerful prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer blacks being convicted.

Meanwhile, Louisiana’s prisoners subsist in dire conditions. Each inmate is worth about $25 a day in state money and sheriffs trade them like horses, loaning any surplus inmates to colleagues whose prisons may not be not full. Thus a prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit. This is a national disgrace. In the past two decades, Louisiana’s prison population has doubled, costing taxpayers billions while New Orleans continues to lead the US in homicides.

This sordid account shows how public officials profit from prison privatization as it allows them to act with minimal accountability. It also reveals that private prisons do not make those that vote for them more secure. A 2011 report by the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out that private prisons are more costly, more violent and less accountable than public prisons and contribute significantly to the extraordinary increases of incarceration in the US.

Among the leading players in providing a wide scope of outsourced security is Serco with 120,000 workers in the US, the UK and 37 other countries. Serco has more than £4 billion in contracts with Britain’s ministry of defense. It jointly runs crucial security operations at Britain’s nuclear weapons facility at Aldermaston, trains pilots for the RAF in Lincolnshire, manages the UK’s ballistic early warning system on the Yorkshire moors, monitors traffic on England’s motorways as well as much of its air traffic control.5

However, Serco is still dogged in the UK by revelations that it had billed the government for electronically tagging prisoners who had died, were back in jail or did not exist. For this security “lapse” it had to repay around £70 million ($110 million) to the government. Britain also cancelled the projected privatization by Serco of three Yorkshire prisons. Serco’s latest embarrassment has been the way it tried to keep secret allegations that one of its male care workers at Yarl’s Wood, Britain’s largest immigration detention center for women, had sexually assaulted a Pakistani. Lawyers for Serco, arguing for keeping the story out of the public sphere, insisted there was a public interest in not disclosing the confidential report on the case.6

G4S (“S” standing for the controversial Securicor Corporation) is the principal outsourcer in the UK, where it employs 45,000 workers out of a global total of some 650,000. Its last minute failure to provide sufficient security guards to patrol the 2012 Olympics in London, forcing British armed servicemen to be brought in as replacements, badly stained its reputation and that of the surveillance industry. It is significant that three of G4S’s top executives in the UK have departed in the past two years over scandals which have rocked the world’s biggest security firm. Keith Vaz, chairman of the House Affairs select committee in Parliament said that “We should not be giving out contracts to companies that have let the country down.”

The larger question is: Does any government really need to outsource the security of the nation and its inhabitants? My answer in these last three blogs is a loud “NO!” Security matters should be out of bounds for outsourcing companies. There are powerful political groups in both the US and the UK that are driven by the belief that private is always better than public and have persistently denigrated the basis of public service. These forces, like the right wings of the Republican Party and of the Conservative Party, are also motivated by the fact that there are substantial profits to be made by outsourcing and almost none in maintaining an effective public service. In conclusion: outsourcing security has meant higher costs to the taxpayers, substantial profits to the outsourcers, and less security and worse service for the state. The time has come to end it.